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Even as Red Hat recently talked up its impressive quarterly results, it’s important to recognize that not all of Linux’s success can be seen in corporate financial results. Much of the benefits of Linux comes from unpaid deployments, which continue to account for a healthy margin of total deployments:

Puppy Linux doesn’t require the kind of liposuction required by the meatier operating systems in the Hive Five in order to fit into a nice portable package. Weighing in at under 100MB, it can easily be loaded on everything from a CD to a USB drive with little fuss. The user interface is friendly even for a non-Linux user, and the basic tools you need for popular portable operations like partitioning and file recovery are readily available—although it’s just as great for web browsing and basic computing. We’ve already taken Puppy Linux for a walk, so check it out if you want a closer look at this friendly portable OS.

Linux compatibility. If you’re reading this page, you’re probably concerned in some small fashion with what works in Linux. And it should go almost without saying that older machines, as a general rule, work better with the Penguin than hardware fresh off the boat.

The further you get from bleeding edge, the easier things become with Linux. I nearly pulled my hair out trying to get an errant ATI video card to work with Linux in 2006; two years later, getting accelerated video on that same machine was literally a click-button installation. If you give yourself a small leeway from brand-new, you’ll be better off.

The reason that I’m switching back to Ubuntu is simple: I’m in favour of open systems, open formats, and open source software in general. These are all the reasons that I switched from the Mac in the first place (find out more about that decision here). Long term, Ubuntu is the right choice for me.

Applications

Inkscape is my vector graphics application of choice. It can do a wide variety of vector drawing tasks with relatively little effort. It uses the now-standard SVG vector format as its native format, and it has become very extensible through a simple “stream-based”, language-agnostic scripting system. On modern systems, it is reasonably responsive (though not the fastest), and the interface layout is well-balanced and fairly intuitive.

Since I use Inkscape every day and it’s clearly my favorite vector graphics tool, there’s really no way my review of it can be unbiased. So I won’t pretend to be. Instead, I’ll just try to be as complete as I can about the more unique features of the program.

Project management tools encompass many different types of software such as scheduling, resource allocation, collaboration software, quality management, and cost control / budget management. This type of software is typically used by project managers looking to plan and control resources, costs and schedules to meet the objectives of a project.

A few days ago I reviewed Deluge, a powerful BitTorrent client for GNOME, so today I will continue in the same manner with the latest release of its KDE counterpart, the popular KTorrent.

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As a conclusion, I find KTorrent to be one of the most powerful clients for the BitTorrent protocol available for Linux, and definitely the best for KDE users. It gets new features and improvements with every release and it also supports trackerless torrents.

* Guake now features real transparency (as you can see in the screenshot above)
* configurable key hotkeys
* full screen (default: F11)
* multiple tab support
* can hide automagically when focus is lost (recommended !)

Desktop Environments

So, since Air is coming along nicely (thanks Nuno), it was the time to make the files Lancelot needs for it. Although there are a few things yet to do, I’m quite satisfied with it. I’m even using Air as my Plasma theme now.

Lying about somewhere in my loft, I uncovered a Targa TS30AS laptop, from sometime in the early to mid 1990s. I’d thrown out the battery ages ago, and the machine is almost as old as me, so I had a certain nostalgia using the DOS/Windows 95 system that was installed on it.

Nevertheless, I wanted to see if it could be pushed a little further. The specs of this machine are laughable by today’s standards: 8miB of RAM, a ~75 or 100mHz CPU (a 486DX2) and a 500miB hard drive. This beast is ancient, without doubt.

Red Hat

Fedora 11 has been released for the Beta testers on 31st March 2009 a week later than the scheduled date. This is the first and only Beta version of the Fedora 11 project codenamed “Leonidas“.

Fedora 11 final release, which is scheduled on 26th May, will include several new features and noteworthy improvements, such as RPM 4.7, which will reduce the memory consumption of complex package activity, tighter integration of PackageKit, faster boot time with a target goal of 20 seconds, and reduced power consumption thanks to a major tuning effort.

Ubuntu

So this month i decide to give my laptop an apple flavor, God knows how much i hate Macs and some element of their interface, like the lack of right click, most of all the lack of freedom and ownership it and every other proprietary Operating system makes me feel.

And let me say that not the technical fancy “things” convinced me to dig deeper into the Linux universe. The real people, the community, the philosophy behind the software persuaded me to invest time of my life into this project.

Sub-notebooks

So far, it is quite interesting. On the good side, the boot is very fast. Currently, it takes about 30 seconds, but the ultimate goal of Moblin is under five! The memory consumption is also very low. There were no stability issues. The desktop is simple, yet functional and pretty is a plain, soothing kind of way. You can have Flash working in about 2 minutes. Software updates are also quite easy.

New releases of Mandriva and KDE Desktop are being optimised for a better netbook experience.

Eager to add Penguin-power to your pint-sized portable? While there’s no shortage of distros pared back to suit a netbook or even optimised for a particular model of netbook – such as the Ubuntu-derivative Eeebuntu for the Asus Eee PC family, or Kuki Linux and Linux4One for the Acer Aspire One – some very high-profile players in the land of Linux are working to become more netbook-friendly.

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But don’t go looking for anything like any current desktop. “We’re really breaking out fairly completely from the taskbar concept, as we’re not trying to make a ‘smaller desktop’” Seigo notes.

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“Just as Apple made popular an interface style on handhelds that is for handhelds with their iPhone/iPod touch interface, netbooks deserve a similar treatment. The emphasis in the design is on full screen usage, speed to information, integration with applications and visual beauty.”

A: Yes, Lucid Imagination officially launched in January of this year. We are the first commercial company exclusively dedicated to the Apache Lucene and Apache Solr open source search technologies. We provide commercial-grade support, training, high-level consulting, and value-added software extensions for Lucene and Solr software.

Kors Engineering, a premier service provider for manufacturing and industrial organizations, today announced it is launching a NiagaraAX open source project to develop and share software modules based on the Tridium NiagaraAX Baja API.

The fortunate thing is that I get to warn students in “ece521″ at the University of Alberta that they should pay only enough attention necessary to pass their tests and forget it all afterwards. Then grab The Pragmatic Programmer or this book (even if you don’t do pair programming). Then join an open source project and write some unit tests, fix some bugs and implement a feature or two. Finally, ignore what everyone says about Open Source, just like bad business models (selling less colorful ads on the internet) make profitable companies, less up-front design makes better software (this does not mean NO design).

Business

So what’s the bottom line? if you’re big enough to make it pay, then bringing in open source development expertise connecting your operation to the world wide open source community gives you comparable or better software, better control, more downstream flexibility, and reduced risks – all pretty good things, right?

As I was running through my RSS feeds this morning, Roberto Galoppini pointed me to a post by James Dixon (the CTO of Pentaho) on the Beekeeper Model for Commercial Open Source (PDF).

It references Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm which I’ve used for years to drive our OpenNMS business, so it caught my attention. I haven’t blogged much about open core for awhile, but I thought this article deserved a closer look.

Events/Conferences

Plone, an open source cms platform that runs on Zope, is planning a World Plone Day 2009. Plone is a free and open source Internet publishing system that combines web content management, social software, collaboration, and enterprise portal features.

Open Source provides a strategic model for extending resources of enterprises large and small, public and private. Technology, support, training, R&D, data feeds, etc., are all provided by a worldwide community of users. These users provide significant input into the product roadmap, testing, quality and ongoing support. What are the risks in Open Source security solutions? How does it compare to commercial alternatives. Will the support and training costs outweigh the savings in license fees and product maintenance?

Health

Proprietary health IT has plenty of representatives here, but open source has several who might be termed persuadable. The future of open source in health IT is still within the power of the President to direct and control.

Defense uses an insurance system called TRICARE managed by a proprietary records system called AHLTA. The Veterans Administration is a single-payer health care system managed by an open source records system called VISTA.

GNU/Hardware

GNU Radio is an open source Software Defined Radio (SDR) project that was started about ten years ago by Eric Blossom, an electrical engineer. The main idea which is behind this project, as its founder says, was to turn all the hardware problems into software problems, that is move the complexity of a radio equipment from the hardware level to the software one, and get the software as close to the antenna as possible.

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The GNU Radio package is provided with a complete HDTV transmitter and receiver, a spectrum analyzer, an oscilloscope, a multichannel receiver and a wide collection of modulators and demodulators.

Open (But No Source Code)

In 2004, a group from the NIH developed and distributed an open-source alternative to commercial proteomics search programs, entitled Open Mass Spectrometry Algorithm (OMSSA). A second open-source proteomics database search is also now available; the X!Tandem, developed and released by the Bevis Laboratory at the University of Manitoba.

When I wrote about the Lumipro Flashgun (yes, the review is coming), a strobe designed by actually listening to the people who would buy it, I called it ‘open source’ (with the quotes). While, technically, it wasn’t true, it certainly followed the spirit of the project.

Now, there is a true open source flash project. Called the SPOT (Strobist Project Opensource Trigger), it is a wireless trigger for off-camera flash, and by downloading the schematics and GPL-licensed` software, you can build it yourself for around $50.

Scientific Learning Corp. has announced it will contribute neuroscience- and technology-based based activities from two of its educational products to open source program FreeReading.net.

The open source program allows users to access, share, and copy online content legally, owing to what is known as a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License, more commonly referred to as a “wiki” license.

When Congress immunized telecoms last August for their illegal participation in Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program, Senate Democratic apologists for telecom immunity repeatedly justified that action by pointing out that Bush officials who broke the law were not immunized — only the telecoms. Here, for instance, is how Sen.

YouTube has partnered with Universal Music Group (UMG) to launch a new music video service called Vevo. Under their agreement, YouTube will provide the infrastructure for a new site at Vevo.com, to be populated with video from artists on UMG-owned labels such as Decca, Def Jam, Mercury Records, and Verve.

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A Single Comment

I will believe VirtualBox is worth shit when OpenBSD – the acid test for virtual machines – works 100% in it. At present X doesn’t run, and Innotek officially don’t care because “no paying customers care.” This was why I disrecommended it at work – it’s far too shoddy work to bother with. It’s fine for casually running Linux or Windows in, but I wouldn’t rely on it for a bloody thing.

The criminal enterprise known as Microsoft finds itself embarrassingly exposed in the courtroom, for the IRS belatedly (decades too late) targets the company in an effort to tackle massive tax evasions

A look at some of last week's patent news, with imperative responses that criticise corporate exploitation of patents for protectionism (excluding and/or driving away the competition using legal threats)

Vista 10 to bring new ways for spies (and other crackers) to remotely access people's computers and remotely modify the binary files on them (via Windows Update, which for most people cannot be disabled)